Brick By Brick

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 Wednesday Hobby Day. 

 Morrie Brickman is best known for his 1960's political newspaper strip The Sall Society. I have shown that he started out doing a small kids feature called Pix Trix that you had the fold in a way similar to Al Jaffee's later Mad Fold-In. In between he did this small thing called Do It Yourself. probably meant to be placed on some sort of activities page in the newspaper.

 

 Saturday Leftover Day.

Before hitting the big time with The Small Society Mprrie Brickman had a long running small feature calles Tric Pix, a small panel similar to Al Jaffee's Mad favorite Fold-In in which the reader had to fold the cartoon twice to see a special effect. I have shown several before (see the name link) and had one left over from a much later date. After it folded (pun intended) he did anotehr single panel feature called Do It Yourself and another one after that called Cross-Cut. Only after that he was an 'overnight' succes.

Hop To It

Saturday Leftover Day.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some weeks of daily strips from the early fifties western strip Hopalong Cassidy by Dan Spiegle. Coincidentally I was going through my set of Phladelphia Bulletin Fun Books and found that they had pages of dailies of this strip as well. Except that they were a couple of years ealrier and in color. So I pulled them up from my raw scan files, added some more Sundays I had not done yet and cleaned the whole thing up.

The Fun Books are up at eBay for a rediculously low price and I recemmoned them for all sorts of collectors. They were an extra 8 page Sunday section for the kids, which was edited by later Family Circle's Bill Keane. He also did Channel Chuckles, which I have shown here a lot. In the forties he worked on the Philadelphia Bulletin, producing thos section, which apart from the occasional cover, also contained his first strip Silly Philly and the punfilled Myrth Quackers. There are several features in Fun Book, from which I particulary like Play Detective and Pic Trix. Pic Trix was a sort of inverted version of Al Jaffee's later fold-in, where you had to fold in parts of the panel to create new images. I was done by Morrie Brickman, who later gained fame with The Small Society. He is not related to Annie Hall co-writer Marshall Brickman, but his son Paul Brickman did write and direct Risky Business.

Serious comic strip fans will like these section for the large tabloid pages of Mandrake and later Hopalong Cassidy. If you are really lucky, you will find one with The Spirit, since it was used as a foldarund for Will Eisner's weekly stories. For some of the Fun Books on my blog you can also follow the link.

More Merry Mirth

Wednesday Illustration Day.

It's been some time since I showed a new scan of the Philadelphia Record's Fun Book. It has Bil Keane's Silly Philly and Mirth-Quackers and puzzles and other stuff and it's just... well, fun. I wante dto share all my scans with the Digital Comic Book Museum, which also has all the Spirit sections that these Sunday newspaper sections were wrapped around. But with Mandrake in it, there was a copyright issue. So if you want to see more, you'll have to follow the link here.

Play Time in Philadelphia

Monday Cartoon Day.

I have been sharing scans of the Philadelphia Record's Fun Book Sunday Section, a combination comic strip section/games section for the kiddies. Toward 1950, it was changed to a more regular comic section, losing it's own cover drawing. But the games features remained, some syndicated and some drawn especially for the paper - by whoever was around, I guess. Regular contributors included later satirical strip artist Morrie Brickman.

Another Brick in the Wall

Monday Cartoon Day.

In 1966 cartoonist Morrie Brickman created the first comic strip designed to go on the editorial page, The Small Society. Taking i's lead from President Johnson's Great Society, it focussed on the daily goings on in Washington. And it was pretty funny. Before that, he tried several other strips, including a similar one about the stock market - which appeared so irregulary in the one paper I could find it in, that I am not sure if it was even a daily. His earliest syndicated effort seems to have been a cartoon he did in 1954, which is not mentioned in the two biographies I have seen online. It was done in a pleasant and early variation of the 'modern' style and fits in very well with the original goals of this blog to show the early work of the modern cartoonists of the sixties. Or could this be another Brickman? I don't think so...

Blue Chips seems to have run from late 1962 to 1965.